Personal information
Biography
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of BioHealth Informatics at the Indiana University of School of Informatics and Computing and an expert practicing certified adult and family nurse practitioner. I earned a Doctor of Nursing (DNP) Practice with a focus on informatics and Master of Science in Health Informatics degrees at Indiana University, concentrating on integrating informatics into practice. In order to also focus on personalized medicine, pharmacogenomics, and health informatics, I completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in December 2019. During this fellowship, I conducted manual data extraction and analysis of data outcomes (interim study) for drug-gene and drug-drug interactions associated with tramadol and codeine therapy in the Indiana Genomics Implementation: An Opportunity for the Underserved (INGENIOUS) Trial. This interim study's two significant findings include genotype and metabolizer status were associated with differential prescribing behavior, and genotype alone was insufficient to predict opioid efficacy (pain control) without considering concomitant drug-drug interactions.
Based on the outcomes from this interim study, I garnered an EMPOWER grant to perform automated data extraction for the INGENIOUS Trial to examine adverse drug events for 19,000+ patients. The data analysis for all participants in the INGENIOUS Trial using automated data extraction is ongoing. The next steps in research and funding involve using informatics approaches to explore the pharmacogenetics and drug-drug interactions associated with these opioids by adding natural language processing to the data extraction methods for the INGENIOUS Trial.
As a healthcare practitioner focusing on the interface between mHealth, research, and education, I am intensely interested in improving population health through innovation and technology use. For example, I applied my informatics knowledge in several Technology Informatics Guiding Educational Reform (TIGER) Initiative projects using mixed methods, including surveys and structured interviews. I collaborated with the National Library of Medicine librarians to develop an international virtual library of nursing informatics and technology resources. I conducted two national surveys about faculty and organizational characteristics associated with informatics/health information technology adoption in DNP programs. I also applied my informatics knowledge and research skills by collaborating to examine the nature of clinical hours that nurse practitioner students complete during practicum courses and exploring the activities of students when they are not engaged in direct patient care. I am a co-investigator for an administrative supplement for the Development of Training Modules in Genomic Medicine for Health Care Professionals to develop an online pharmacogenomics education program for multidisciplinary healthcare providers. This training will include modular/multi-level training, the ability to work with real genetic data, micro-credentialing (digital badges), and continuing education credits that will meet individual clinicians' varying needs. This education will be based on the Test2Learn platform and will be scalable for nationwide deployment. In June 2021, I was awarded an internal competitive research award to use currently existing natural language processing (NLP) tools to help extract data from the clinical narrative (free-text) notes relevant to adverse reactions to opioids.